Development Update 1 - June

[MacIntoc]

I do actually have Odyssey and play it - it looks different from Horizons for sure but we're back to the point about subjectivity aren't we? I don't have a problem with it, which is not the same thing as saying 'it looks identical to Horizons.' Because it doesn't. You want certain elements to be brighter and certain other elements to not be brighter - I get it but unless they introduce the ability to change individual elements of the scene its never going to happen.

It relies on a lot of things. The base issue is that the pipelines (code segment that draws a part of the picture like space, HUD, cockpit, planet surface, sky, ...) do not release their work in the same color space (HDR, sRGB, RGB, undefined, ...). Some seem to apply a tone mapping to reduce the size of their color space, others don't. Some have their own gamma correction, others lose gamma data in the process,... Probably because each of them were done by a different team and these teams didn't communicate with each other.
So when it comes to merge all these results, depending on the monitor, how it's configured, calibrated, what type of connection is used (DVI, DP or HDMI), the graphics card and its settings, the intensions of the developers (so none in the case of FDev, no joke)... Dx tries to guess implicitly how to mix it all up correctly and falls more or less far from the plate depending on the case.
And finaly, add over the top of this fun mess, personnal perception and preferences.

 

[Mark Zero]

46 pages, many valid questions asked and worthy points raised, yet not one Dev / CM reply.....

I mean, most of the "points raised" are "We're mad that you've admitted that the game was so buggy that you don't have a road map for the future right now", and then general griping and complaining about pet issues X, Y, and Z not being addressed yet.

Just, for a moment, consider that "we're still figuring out what comes next" means "we have our hands full with fixing the issues that sprang up from adding an entire on-foot gameplay system onto our spaceship game, and we don't have the bandwidth right now to think about new stuff until we fix everything we screwed up", and doesn't mean "lol we have your money and now we're abandoning the game lol".

 

[VR Lucian Arkright]

It relies on a lot of things. The base issue is that the pipelines (code segment that draws a part of the picture like space, HUD, cockpit, planet surface, sky, ...) do not release their work in the same color space (HDR, sRGB, RGB, undefined, ...). Some seem to apply a tone mapping to reduce the size of their color space, others don't. Some have their own gamma correction, others lose gamma data in the process,... Probably because each of them were done by a different team and these teams didn't communicate with each other.
So when it comes to merge all these results, depending on the monitor, how it's configured, calibrated, what type of connection is used (DVI, DP or HDMI), the graphics card and its settings, the intensions of the developers (so none in the case of FDev, no joke)... Dx tries to guess implicitly how to mix it all up correctly and falls more or less far from the plate depending on the case.
And finaly, add over the top of this fun mess, personnal perception and preferences.

Having seen the videos where people have actually debugged the render output, this is both true and mindboggling that the separate teams were not working to defined standards. You don't even need to be an ISO:9001 accredited organisation to know this is a good idea, and I don't think COVID and working from home can be excuses here.

There's nothing they would be able to say about points raised here, besides what Arf already said in the OP

Then maybe just one of them could come on here are say it themselves and end the speculation?

 

[StevieG]

Lets all be happy we still have community goals and galnet news and the game is no longer in maintenance mode... its in hotbuild mode.

 

[Lysette]

I mean, most of the "points raised" are "We're mad that you've admitted that the game was so buggy that you don't have a road map for the future right now", and then general griping and complaining about pet issues X, Y, and Z not being addressed yet.

Just, for a moment, consider that "we're still figuring out what comes next" means "we have our hands full with fixing the issues that sprang up from adding an entire on-foot gameplay system onto our spaceship game, and we don't have the bandwidth right now to think about new stuff until we fix everything we screwed up", and doesn't mean "lol we have your money and now we're abandoning the game lol".

But they don't offer refunds either - so it is still "lol we have your money, now we'll take our time with this, because nothing else is coming from you money-wise anyway in the near future". They messed up and the least to be expected is to not refuse refund requests. This was a blatant cash grab - and they aren't even ashamed of it.

 

[MacIntoc]

Having seen the videos where people have actually debugged the render output, this is both true and mindboggling that the separate teams were not working to defined standards. You don't even need to be an ISO:9001 accredited organisation to know this is a good idea, and I don't think COVID and working from home can be excuses here.

If you're referring to the culling gate, i actually suspect that it's something that wasn't originally fully implemented in the engine simply because it wasn't really needed in Horizon and even less in ED. And that they realized it late in Odyssey (probably because, here again, the teams who worked on the Odyssey improvements didn't have the opportunity to communicate with the teams who designed the engine).

 

[VR Lucian Arkright]

If you're referring to the culling gate, i actually suspect that it's something that wasn't originally fully implemented in the engine simply because it wasn't really needed in Horizon and even less in ED. And that they realized it late in Odyssey (probably because, here again, the teams who worked on the Odyssey improvements didn't have the opportunity to communicate with the teams who designed the engine).

No, someone pulled the render engine apart and commented on all the different colour spaces used, which meant that it was impossible to balance the gamma levels properly through shader mods. I'll see if I can find the video later.

 

[Lysette]

If you're referring to the culling gate, i actually suspect that it's something that wasn't originally fully implemented in the engine simply because it wasn't really needed in Horizon and even less in ED. And that they realized it late in Odyssey (probably because, here again, the teams who worked on the Odyssey improvements didn't have the opportunity to communicate with the teams who designed the engine).

People have fps drop by about half when approaching stations compared to EDH - so EDH has most likely culling.

 

[dm06]

Great reading, thanks!

Could you please mark the updates not by number (Development Update 1) but month/year (Development Update 06/2021)?
Or even month/year#number (Development Update 06/2021#1)?
Thanks!

 

[MacIntoc]

No, someone pulled the render engine apart and commented on all the different colour spaces used, which meant that it was impossible to balance the gamma levels properly through shader mods. I'll see if I can find the video later.

I saw a topic on this subject but no video. If you can find the link, i'm curious to see it

 

[VR Lucian Arkright]

If you're referring to the culling gate, i actually suspect that it's something that wasn't originally fully implemented in the engine simply because it wasn't really needed in Horizon and even less in ED. And that they realized it late in Odyssey (probably because, here again, the teams who worked on the Odyssey improvements didn't have the opportunity to communicate with the teams who designed the engine).

Odyssey space has "too much contrast" - breaking down the rendering of a frame

I, as some many other people got appalled by the hideous luminance distribution and color saturation issues exhibited by the Odyssey renderer. Since I'm a computer graphics developer myself and do consulting work for critical graphics systems (think medical imaging, CT, MRI, and such) I took a...

forums.frontier.co.uk

Turns out it wasn't a video - and it's even closer to home than I remembered!
It's from step 16 onwards that the colour space issues become apparent.

 

[MacIntoc]

People have fps drop by about half when approaching stations compared to EDH - so EDH has most likely culling.

No, there is no inside or NPC to draw in Horizon

 

[dm06]

People have fps drop by about half when approaching stations compared to EDH - so EDH has most likely culling.

I suspect that station interiors are different. At least at texture levels for sure because the landing pads rendering looks different.

 

[AJH16]

There is simply not enough here to be confident in Elite's future. This is incredibly disheartening.

This was your opportunity to give us something other than noting basic improvements and acknowledging issues that should not have made it into release in the first place (there is no justification that the team did not know Odyssey would be released in a broken state).

You are effectively telling us that Elite has no future plans.

You've stated on SCN that there is more coming down the line. I don't doubt that. I don't doubt, given the pacing, that the Azimuth Saga is planned out well enough to hold up Elite's narrative until console launch. However, this pattern of giving us hope for something better and then significantly underdelivering makes those claims redundant because what we now expect is that whatever is planned down the line will continue to be underwhelming and disappointing and frustrating.

Here's a transcript of what you had to say about this dev post on yesterday's SCN:


"...all the information we are going to give -- and there's quite a bit of it --..."

And yet now you're admitting:


There's no way that you did have quite a bit of information that you were going to give and somehow that draft of this post was severely trimmed down.

Clearly you knew that there was not going to be quite a bit of information that you were going to give. How do you justify this given your communication philosophy of honesty?

Clearly it was an explicit lie that there was quite a bit of information that you were going to give. Clearly that was an untenable claim that was intended to give people false hope.

FDev mismanaged this unique, pivotal opportunity. Mismanagement is the operative word in this whole situation.

Warhammer and F1 must be paying attention and evaluating whether they want to be associated with a faulty business that can't deliver.

Good luck on stream Thursday.

Or they hoped to have had more issues fixed with more to share and hoped to be in a state they could work on intended new things, but were not able to because issues are taking longer than expected.

I'm not a game dev, but I am a software dev. Reading between the lines here, they are in crisis mode (which they should be) and are focused on dealing with the current crisis before progressing in to new stuff. There are even indications there may be more updates before console launch. And ultimately console launch is not exclusively "new" development vs a continuation of fixes in the context of adding the work necessary for console which will also involve working out a lot of performance issues as consoles can't simply power through it.

This was a good update. It's an update that shows they are currently in over their head and working on getting out of it, but shows they may still be thrashing a bit for a little while longer, though they are generally making progress.

They could have been more blunt about this to people that aren't devs, but I'm not sure they realized they weren't being blunt as it reads pretty clearly to me as a software developer and software developers aren't always the best at communicating to non-developers.

 

[Cryvern]

I have an idea, what if the cockpit lighting was a toggle? Something the likes of the headlights, you press a button and turn off most lights inside the cockpit or leave it lit up. I think having it all dark has kinda of an ambiance to it.

 

[MacIntoc]

I have an idea, what if the cockpit lighting was a toggle? Something the likes of the headlights, you press a button and turn off most lights inside the cockpit or leave it lit up. I think having it all dark has kinda of an ambiance to it.

It's already the case. Look at you're keybind.

 

[Flimley]

Hooray for everything. \o/

Flimley

 

[Prof Horatio Hafnaugels]

No, there is no inside or NPC to draw in Horizon

The most effective culling ever, I'd say!

 

[Mark Zero]

Or they hoped to have had more issues fixed with more to share and hoped to be in a state they could work on intended new things, but were not able to because issues are taking longer than expected.

I'm not a game dev, but I am a software dev. Reading between the lines here, they are in crisis mode (which they should be) and are focused on dealing with the current crisis before progressing in to new stuff. There are even indications there may be more updates before console launch. And ultimately console launch is not exclusively "new" development vs a continuation of fixes in the context of adding the work necessary for console which will also involve working out a lot of performance issues as consoles can't simply power through it.

This was a good update. It's an update that shows they are currently in over their head and working on getting out of it, but shows they may still be thrashing a bit for a little while longer, though they are generally making progress.

They could have been more blunt about this to people that aren't devs, but I'm not sure they realized they weren't being blunt as it reads pretty clearly to me as a software developer and software developers aren't always the best at communicating to non-developers.

I think you hit the nail on the head, here. That's what I got out of this, too. "Guys, we have no future plans because we are underwater on fixing the current issues. Once that's done, we'll look forward." Maybe they needed to state that more bluntly.

Although, considering it was Arf posting the update, you might think he would've said it with that kind of bluntness.

 

[MacIntoc]

I think you hit the nail on the head, here. That's what I got out of this, too. "Guys, we have no future plans because we are underwater on fixing the current issues. Once that's done, we'll look forward." Maybe they needed to state that more bluntly.

Although, considering it was Arf posting the update, you might think he would've said it with that kind of bluntness

These communications are also followed by the shareholders. A panic crash is the last thing that FDev need.